It also needed to be scanned for any information pertaining to a murder at the Orsic Motel. (Nothing.)
The last time I dialed Aimee Light’s number was on the morning of November fifth. Her cell phone wasn’t even on anymore.
I checked my e-mail. There were no longer any messages coming from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks at 2:40 a.m.
I couldn’t tell if the carpeting in the living room was darker. The writer told me it was. But he also said it didn’t matter anymore.
The furniture was still in the same formation I’d known as a child. The writer confirmed this as well, then wanted to inspect the exterior of the house.
When we walked around to the side of the house facing the Allens’, we saw that the wall was still in the process of changing. The salmon pink had darkened and the stucco was pronouncing itself more forcefully in wheeling patterns that were suddenly appearing everywhere. The writer whispered to me: the house is turning into the one you grew up in.
I moved on to the front of the house, where the peeling continued to spread its warning.
The sweet, rank smell of something dead was noticeable immediately.
There was a hedge that aisled the lower half of the northern side of the house and I scanned it until I saw the cat.
It was lying on its side, spine arched, its small yellow teeth locked in a frozen grimace, and its intestines leeched the ground, clinging to the dirt they had poured onto. Its eyes were squeezed tight with what I first thought was pain.
But when the writer forced me to look more closely, I realized that something had pecked them out.
The ground was soaked with blood, and viscera that the Terby had slashed from the cat’s belly were sprayed across the daisied hedge, now hovering with flies.
I imagined that something was witnessing my discovery of the cat, and I whirled around as a sudden flash of black rounded the corner of the house.
The writer promised me this was not something I had dreamt.
But I could not imagine how the Terby had captured the cat.
I could not imagine the doll doing this.
The Terby was simply a prop from a horror movie.
But there was a part of the writer that wanted the Terby to have killed the cat.
The writer could imagine that scene: the doll keeping watch—a sentinel—from its perch on Sarah’s window ledge, the doll spotting the cat, the doll swooping down, the doll grappling with the cat beneath the tightly trimmed hedge, a talon raised, and then what? Did it play with the cat before eventually slashing it in half? Did the thing feed on the cat? Was the last thing the cat saw the contorted face of the bird and above it an empty gray sky? The writer pondered the various scenarios until I stepped in and forced the writer to hope this was not true. Because if I believed that the doll was responsible, the ground I stood on would shift into a world made of quicksand.
But it was too late.
It was at this point that I recognized the cat.
I had seen it the night before.
When its mouth was stained red, and blood from a paw smeared a windowpane.
The mangled thing at my feet belonged to Aimee Light.
I did not tell this to the writer because the scenario he would have come up with—the obstacles he would solve and the world he would make me believe in—was more than I could bear on the morning of November fifth.
So just as quickly as I recognized the cat as Aimee Light’s I immediately forced the thought from my mind before the writer could notice this detail and leap on it, expanding it with a horrible logic until everything surrounding us turned black.
Regardless of whether the Terby had killed the cat, I was determined to get rid of it that day.
I went back into the house to find it.
Marta had taken Robby and Sarah to school. Rosa was cleaning the kitchen.
I assumed that if the Terby was in the house it would be upstairs lying innocently in Sarah’s bedroom.
But the Terby was not in Sarah’s bedroom. This was a discovery I made after a cursory inspection of the room.
The writer told me it was hiding. The writer told me I needed to entice it from the hiding place.
I asked the writer how does something that’s not alive hide itself?
I asked the writer how do you entice something that’s not alive out of its hiding place?
This silenced the writer momentarily. The silence eventually worried me.
The writer was reactivated when I moved to Sarah’s window and gazed down at the hedge and the mutilated cat.
The writer suggested we go to Robby’s room.
I hesitated in the hallway outside Robby’s room and stared at the grooves carved in the bottom of the door, then turned the knob and entered.
The room was pristine.
It was in the neatest condition I had ever seen. Nothing was out of place.
The bed was tightly made. There were no clothes strewn across the floor. The video-game cartridges and DVDs and magazines were stacked in even piles. The Martian landscape of the carpet had been recently vacuumed. There were no empty Starbucks cups lining the top of the minifridge. His desk was immaculate. The pillows on the leather sofa had no indentations on them. Every surface was clean. The room smelled of varnish and lemon.
It was a showroom.
Everything was exact.
And it felt empty.
It was supposed to feel peaceful.
But there had been a concentrated effort to also make it feel benign.
No one had ever lived in it.
There was something horribly wrong about this.
This wrongness drew me toward the computer.
The moon was pulsing on its screen.
Again: hesitation. And then: the need for things to speed up.
Nadine Allen’s anguished theory whirled into the barren room.
The word
The desktop appeared on the screen.
I knew no one was upstairs but I looked over my shoulder anyway.
After tapping “My Documents,” I walked over and shut the door.
When I returned to the desk, on the Gateway’s screen was a list of roughly one hundred WordPerfect documents.
I started perspiring.
As I scrolled to the bottom of the screen I saw there were ten documents that had been downloaded from somewhere.
These files had initials for titles.
The writer was immediately able to attach names to them.
MC could have been Maer Cohen.
Was TS Tom Salter?
EB was Eddie Burgess.
JW: Josh Wolitzer.
CM equaled Cleary Miller.
As I tapped the document for MC suddenly a box flashed on the screen, asking me for a password.
Why would a password be needed to open a document?
I scanned the room while the writer wondered what Robby’s password might be.
